Narrative Understanding Quotes

There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.

If anybody reads a story in a magazine or book, different pictures compete in their minds.

History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.

In music, you can use metaphors with ease - if a person doesn't understand the parable, they can still enjoy the melody of the music. If, however, a person reads a book and misses the meaning of its metaphors, this will be extremely disheartening for both the reader as well as the author.

My teaching forces me to articulate what I think works in a piece of fiction and how I think it works. All of that gives me energy as a writer.

Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost nonexistent.

It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology

In the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life.

In my early 20s, connecting with fiction was a difficult process. There seemed to be little rhyme or reason to what was meaningful, what convinced, and what made sense.

A novel is no mere assemblage of gears; it is a wild and living being. And how are you to discern the intentions of a creature - to discover its true nature - other than by close and respectful observation?

In the hyper-sensitised reality of the region in which any criticism of Israel is swiftly and often unfairly branded as anti-Semitic, it can become counterproductive to inflame rather than explain and this means to hear the narratives of both sides, to articulate the suffering on both sides, not just the Palestinians.

I have found that the person with a sense of story built in from childhood is in better shape than one who has not had stories . . One knows what stories can do, how they can make up worlds and transpose existence into these worlds. . . .One learns that worlds are made by words and not only by hammers and wires.

Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.

The narrative related to economics is, I think, very well understood even by the common man.

I believe that we are a story-driven species and that we understand how things are put together, in the context of narrative. It's a shame that science hasn't been taught that way, in a long time. It's usually the fact completely devoid of any human experience or any idea of how the scientist came to that conclusion.

If you're a fan of it, there's a lot of things that plays into what the fans of the series want. If you've never seen them before, a lot of people who have seen it tell me that it's the most accessible of the three. It's a solid story, by itself, and it's more of a sort of action film. When I was watching Twilight the other day, I realized that you do need to read the book to get it.

Life usually tells the best stories - but sometimes it takes an artist to show us what they mean.

I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.

I would say what Mad Men has taught me has been a super elevated evaluation of text in general, and understanding subtext, and understanding where a character comes from - what he means by this or by that.

Part of being a fiction writer is being able to imagine how someone else is thinking and feeling. I think I've always been good at that.

People tend to take stories literally these days.

I suppose what I aspire to do is to make it easy for the audience to connect with a story.

I'm always a little apprehensive about 'decoding' fictional stories.

It's nice to know when you're a part of a story, it's nice to know at least something about the beginning, middle, and end.

I think there's a natural link between the fact that our self is a story that we make up and that we're drawn to stories. It resonates, in a way.